Judkins – Where Fine Coachwork is a Heritage

by Rich Ray

Originally published in the May-June 2012 issue of the CCCA Michigan Region Torque magazine.

Katie Robbins recently loaned me a very interesting vin­tage promotional booklet printed by the J.B. Judkins Company. It is an interesting piece of advertising probably handed out to potential customers to convince them that a custom Judkins body was the best choice for their new car.

Article continues below photo gallery.

While there is no publication date in the booklet, there are a couple of clues to
its age. First, a statement in the concluding paragraph of this 34-page document
points out that the Judkins plant “is busier than ever before in its seventy-two
years of active life.” Since the company was founded in 1857, a little math puts
the year of publication as 1929. Second is a sketch of a Judkins-bodied car described
as “modern, 1932 Lincoln KB Coupe by Judkins thoroughly automotive in spirit, Judkins’
designers look ahead” that bears a strong resemblance to a 1930 Cadillac. So this
document was published at the height of the custom body era, when customers for
luxury cars often purchased just the chassis from the auto manufacturer and then
had a body custom made to their tastes by an independent coachbuilder.

Judkins was one of the two largest coachbuilders in the Classic era, along with
Brunn & Company, and was among the group of well-known coach builders who started
out in the horse-drawn era following only Brewster and Quinby in age. Like most
of the coach builders of the era, Judkins is most closely associated with one auto
manufacturer, Lincoln, in their case. Like the others, Judkins was often approached
by a customer to custom design a body to their tastes, but they also offered a catalog
or “pattern” book of designs to help guide the customer. They produced thousands
of series-built and full custom bodies with production averaging around 500 bodies
per year at the peak.

The CCCA website lists 60 Judkins-bodied cars belonging to members: three Duesenbergs,
one Packard, one Pierce-Arrow and the rest Lincolns. This article will not go into
great detail on the history of Judkins, since it was thoroughly covered in a six-part
series in the Classic Car in 1964, based on Judkins company archives subsequently
donated to the CCCA Museum by Constance Jud­kins Bowman, daughter of John B. Judkins.

While a well-established company prior to the Classic era, much of Judkins success
during the period was due to its chief designer, John F. Dobben. His father had
been a coachbuilder for Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and began his career
in the Pope-Hartford body shop. He was chief draftsman for J. M. Quinby & Sons
until they closed in 1917, and then he went to work for Judkins. He was responsible
for the design of all Judkins bodies from 1921, when Luxury attained new heights
in the brougham of 1890 Body styles remained unchanged for the first horseless carriages
Models for 1907 were still clearly carriage bodies Fully enclosed—a significant
forward step in 1910 design Modern, thoroughly automotive in spirit, Judkins designers
look ahead they were building six bodies a week, through their peak of 24 per six-day
week in 1928.

Judkins’ association with Lincoln began in 1921 when a Boston Lincoln dealer ordered
a custom four-passenger sedan body from Judkins for a new Lincoln chassis. It was
a major aesthetic improvement over Lincoln’s rather staid standard bodies. Henry
M. Leland, Lincoln’s founder, was well recognized for his mechanical, but not design,
abilities. The favorable reception of this body led to an immediate order for 50
more followed by another 374 over the next year. Over the period through 1939, Judkins
produced a total of 5,904 custom and series-custom bodies for Lincoln, more than
any other coachbuilder.

Judkins also built over a thousand bodies for Winton, 200 for Packard, 27 for Duesenberg
(some designed by Duesenberg’s Gordon Buehrig), as well as Cadillac, Locomobile,
Marmon, Mercer, Pierce-Arrow and Stearns-Knight. Most were series-built customs,
but many were full-custom designs.

The booklet details the founding of the company by John B. Judkins in the lower
valley of the Merrimac River in Massachu­setts, which was the home of poet John
Greenleaf Whittier, buggy makers and the mills of Lowell and Lawrence. After six
years as an apprentice and master trimmer, Judkins started his own firm with $300,
building a two-wheeled, one horse “shay” buggy as his first product. Entries in
their accounting records shown in the booklet tell how a chaise buggy was sold for
a carload of potatoes or a large supply of tea, which was then used to pay the workmen
in lieu of cash. The firm thrived through the shakeout in the buggy business—from
72 shops in the 1870’s to two in 1929. Thus, Judkins was able to proclaim itself
as “the builders of fine coachcraft for three generations.” Judkins first automobile
body job was an order for twenty bodies for a vehicle for the Electric Vehicle company
of Hartford. Judkins experience with closed bodies served them well since the bodies
they produced were almost exact duplicates of the horse-drawn brougham bodies they
had been producing.

The booklet includes a series of product sketches that do a great job of illustrating
the transition of body design from the horse-drawn to the automobile era. It took
twenty years for Judkins to complete the transition from manufacturing horse-drawn
to auto­mobile bodies in 1910. Looking at the series of five sketches, one can see
the common design flavor carried through the transition, particularly the gently
curving vertical line starting from windshield pillar to the bottom of the body.

The booklet concludes by presenting the parallels between the construction of the
modern car body and the fine closed car­riage body of the late-nineties, including
the structural framework, joinery, reinforcing castings, hand fitting. This description
is “why the Judkins plant, cradled here in the New England hills, is busier today
than ever before.”

However, this “busyness” was not to last and by 1934, the economic depression brought
the custom coachbuilding business to a trickle. In 1936, to keep the plant operating,
Judkins started producing traditional barrel-roofed diners marketed as Sterling
diners. While the popularity of these diners appeared to possibly save the company,
an economic slowdown caused a large number of customers to default causing the company
to finally close in 1942, 85 years after its founding and 12 years after publication
of this booklet.